Policy is the best honesty

Washington Monthly, April, 2008 by Paul Glastris

A lot of journalists get lured into the profession by the excitement--the chance to cover wars, natural disasters, political campaigns, or the lives of powerful people. I'm not immune to such inducements and have done a bit of all of the above. But most of my time in the business has been spent engaged in what might be called "policy vetting." Does a particular government policy work as advertised? Would a proposed new idea work if it were actually tried? This is not the most Hunter Thompsonesque form of journalism. But it's one I find endlessly fascinating, in part because it provides a bracing check on one's ideological biases.

For instance, as a center-left guy, I generally favor expanding global trade but fear its downward pull on American wages. So I'm sympathetic to toughening labor standards in international trade deals, an idea Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama both have called for. But are such standards really enforceable? That's an open question. In our cover story this month, T. A. Frank takes a step toward answering it. He does so by letting us in on the failures and successes of the profession he used to work in: private-sector consultants who monitor wages and working conditions in foreign factories for major U.S. companies. Also in this issue, Greg Anrig explains why hard empirical evidence is increasingly leading conservatives to give up on one of their favorite ideas, school vouchers. And Michael Waldman makes the case--one liberals and conservatives ought to be able to agree on--for an ingenious new policy idea that is quietly catching on at the state level: legislation that would, in effect, kill off the Electoral College.

Waldman was my boss back when we both wrote speeches for President Bill Clinton. That was another experience in policy vetting. Modern White House speechwriters seldom have a direct hand in setting policy. Their job is mostly to find the words to sell proposals crafted by the various White House policy shops and approved by the president--a task that often forces the policy folks to think more clearly about what they're proposing. If I had any moral qualms about joining the administration in September 1998, they were not about the then-unfolding Monica Lewinsky investigation--I thought Washington's fixation on that scandal was a form of insanity--but the possibility that I might be asked to write speeches about policies that I thought were indefensible.

Thankfully, that never happened. The Clinton White House policy shops reflected the careful, obsessive wonkiness of the president himself. No proposal ever crossed my desk that didn't seem programmatically sound.

Well, almost none. I once had to write a speech announcing new federal grants for local "gun buybacks." Such programs tend to reap lots of rusty, inoperable World War II-era revolvers from the attics of the elderly while doing virtually nothing to get guns off the street. One University of Pennsylvania expert on crime prevention program assessment called gun buybacks "the program that is best known to be ineffective." But buybacks are enormously popular with big-city voters and relatively unthreatening to gun rights activists, so we were for them. When I grumbled to the policy guy with whom I worked on the speech, he smiled and shook his head in agreement. Yeah, we know they're pretty useless, he said. But they're also harmless, they get the communities fired up, and, anyway, we're spending a relative pittance ($15 million) on the stupid things.

This helped salve my conscience--that and the fact that the speech was also a chance to advocate for something I really did believe in: the COPS program. The core of the administration's crime policy, it put nearly 100,000 additional cops on the streets with federal grants that also required police departments to adopt community policing strategies. It was a kind of domestic version of the "surge" in Iraq, and it is one of the reasons why the violent crime rate fell during the 1990s by more than 40 percent.

The connection between the vetting and selling of policy has been on my mind lately because it is the underlying theme of a marvelous new book by Robert Schlesinger, White House Ghosts: Presidents and Their Speechwriters. It is a history of the modern presidency as seen through the eyes of White House speechwriters (the author, the son of Arthur Schlesinger Jr., comes by his subject honestly). One of many revealing anecdotes involves the now-famous deliberations among John F. Kennedy and his senior advisors in October 1962 upon learning that the Soviets had placed nuclear missiles in Cuba. After several days, a rough consensus developed among the group that the central U.S. response would be a naval blockade. Ted Sorensen, a participant in those meetings, was dispatched to write the speech, but his pen faltered.

"Back in my office," he recalled, "the original difficulties with the blockade route stared me in the face: How should we relate it to the missiles? How would it help get them out? What would we do if they became operational? What should we say about our surveillance, about communications with Khrushchev?"